Electrochemical metallization cell with solid phase tunable Ge2Sb2Te5 electrolyte.

Electrochemical metallization (ECM) cell kinetics are strongly determined by the electrolyte and can hardly be altered after the cell has been fabricated. Solid-state property tunable electrolytes in response to external stimuli are therefore desirable to introduce additional operational degree of freedom to the ECM cells, enabling novel applications such as multistate memory and reconfigurable computation. In this work, we use Ge2Sb2Te5(GST) as the electrolyte material whose solid state is switched from the amorphous(a) to the crystalline(c) phase thermally. Electrical heating too is readily achievable. The resistive switching characteristics of the cells with different GST phases are examined. The magnitude of the high resistance, the SET voltage and the on/off ratio are found to be considerably affected by the solid phase of GST, whereas the magnitude of the low resistance is least affected. Moreover, a transition from volatile to nonvolatile SET switching is only observed for c-GST based cell under prolonged voltage sweep, but not for a-GST based cell. This work provides a springboard for more studies on the manipulation of the ECM cell kinetics by tunable electrolyte and the resulting unprecedented device functionalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]